(Application deadline Friday September 30, 2011) Inclusive Media for Change, a CSDS-based initiative that runs a clearing house of ideas, information and alternatives on India’s rural crises (www.im4change.org), invites applications for media fellowships for journalists in English and Hindi for 2011. The ideal candidates would be willing to spend two to three weeks with rural communities and write series of stories or make radio/ TV programmes on grassroots issues that require...

Anna Hazare's campaign may lead to a new Lokpal Bill, but it has legitimised middle-class vigilantism and other kinds of civil society mobilisation. NOW that Anna Hazare has declared victory, it is time to take stock of one of the most powerful recent mobilisations of people in India, focussed on influencing policy or lawmaking processes. The victory, however, is largely symbolic. The original demand of the movement, carefully built around Hazare's...

-The Times of India   It is known to most media watchers that Kasturi & Sons Ltd, the company that publishes The Hindu, is caught in a bitter family feud. N Murali, who recently retired as managing director of the company, wrote a farewell letter to the employees of the company, lamenting that the Hindu's rich tradition of credibility, objectivity, balance and editorial primacy had of late been compromised. Later, in an...

As the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement moves to the legislative phase it has to rid itself of the panacea model. The Hazare group has to realise that it has no monopoly on diagnosis or the cure for corruption. The Lokpal is no magic bullet which will solve the problem of corruption. Corruption needs a more cautious and nuanced problematic and a wider set of solutions. To put it facetiously, Hazare’s...

In covering Anna, TV seems to have shed its critical faculties “Corruption,” I remarked the other day on a television channel, “takes more than one form.” We were talking about—what else?—the latest incremental progression in the Anna Hazare saga. “Everyone talks of money corruption, but what about the other kind—‘Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’? And who has any kind of power now? Only two entities: Anna Hazare and television.” That’s...